dasiro wrote:improved VRAM usage would be a nice thing, since 3GB for the high-res is quite steep for older cards, causing major FPS drops while passing dense trees or steam engines. I've been playing around with some of the graphics options, but it's still pretty confusing

High res textures are specifically not for older cards. They're a nice bonus for people with the hardware to use them.

still it's not like they are super-detailed or have a high polygon count, hell there's only 1 static angle that needs to be rendered, so in comparison with other much more detailed games that don't hog that much VRAM this is rather poor.

Well, it would seem that Factorio, up until now, was not that optimized as far as graphics are concerned :
comparing with 2D games with a similar number of units on-screen like Distant Worlds (or even Starcraft 1),
I get much worse FPS in Factorio (with "normal" definition sprites),
but it would seem that the devs were paying attention to that, bless them !

Twinsen wrote:

The new graphics back-end rewrite is nearing finalization. A closed-beta branch was sent to a few players to test that rendering works correctly across different hardware. The rendering is faster and no major issues were reported so far. But there is still much to do, such as improvements to VRAM usage and many experiments with shaders.

(Also, Factorio is not a 3D game : there are no polygons, or angles of view - they are 2D sprites, in fact I'd expect that most of the acceleration that dedicated (3D!) graphic cards provide is completely unused...)

And in general looking at "hacks" that mods are currently doing and seeing if it's reasonable to make the game support what the mod was trying to do in a non-hacky way.

The very first thing that came to my mind when I saw this was: Factorissimo!!
I have no idea how this mod does what it does but I get the distinct feeling it is doing something hacky that the game doesn't natively support. There are a few quirks that the mod has, such as not having good power reporting to the outside world and also eating up a lot of ticks when transferring massive amounts of material in and out of the buildings.

BlueTemplar wrote:Well, it would seem that Factorio, up until now, was not that optimized as far as graphics are concerned :
comparing with 2D games with a similar number of units on-screen like Distant Worlds (or even Starcraft 1),
I get much worse FPS in Factorio (with "normal" definition sprites),
but it would seem that the devs were paying attention to that, bless them !

Twinsen wrote:

The new graphics back-end rewrite is nearing finalization. A closed-beta branch was sent to a few players to test that rendering works correctly across different hardware. The rendering is faster and no major issues were reported so far. But there is still much to do, such as improvements to VRAM usage and many experiments with shaders.

(Also, Factorio is not a 3D game : there are no polygons, or angles of view - they are 2D sprites, in fact I'd expect that most of the acceleration that dedicated (3D!) graphic cards provide is completely unused...)

The problem with the high V-Ram use is exactly here.
With 3D models u need one texture for the object and map it onto the moving polygons.
With the 2D engine u need a texture / sprite for every animation frame which increase texture space. But for that u have much less calculations since u have no transformations to calculate.
With a game like factorio and the amount of objects on the screen there is no propper way of 3D rendering everything since u can't deal with the amount of needed polygons.

Ghoulish wrote:The key chains are really cool. I could of sworn you were going to show off the new electric info screen this week, my prediction must of been for the other multiverse.. Next week maybe?

*could HAVE sworn

(I decided to *NEVER* let that slide, because it's just the worst error I know)

zyklame wrote:With 3D models u need one texture for the object and map it onto the moving polygons.
With the 2D engine u need a texture / sprite for every animation frame which increase texture space. But for that u have much less calculations since u have no transformations to calculate.
With a game like factorio and the amount of objects on the screen there is no propper way of 3D rendering everything since u can't deal with the amount of needed polygons.

GPUs are special purpose hardware optimized to calculate and render geometry - and todays GPUs are really good at it.
Rendering thousands of duplicates of a few simple models in a scene is already done for showing grass and other repeated geometry in current games. So obviously, GPUs can do that.
Since DirectX 9 and OpenGL 3.1 there also is API support for geometry instancing wich drastically reduces the amount of draw calls needed to render massive amounts of duplicated stuff (games exhibit much more grass, foliage and clutter since then).
So rendering Factorio in 3D while having all the items on the belts is feasible. But you would need to rewrite the graphics engine from scratch - and that is not likely to happen this year (i expect 0.17 to get released around xmas).
Also players would probably need a dedicated GPU (but a cheap one would do) to play the game with 60 FPS at 1080p. So most laptop users and people playing at work would have to play on lowest settings and would still not get acceptable FPS.

Integrated graphics have gotten much better in the recent years : you can even consider playing 3D games on them !
A 3D Factorio that would not push graphics too much (think Starcraft 2 quality?) should have reasonable performance...

Especially since a reasonable target would not be 1920x1080 at 60 FPS, but 1366x768 at 30 FPS ! (4 times less pixels per second !) (because smaller screen Laptops - and Factorio isn't a First Person Shooter to need 60FPS !)

BlueTemplar wrote:A 3D Factorio that would not push graphics too much (think Starcraft 2 quality?) should have reasonable performance...

It doesn´t (push). My card doesn´t even turn on the fan and runs passively cooled. Still half of the Vram is filled... Which is good, I don´t expect the power supply to really cope with the card and the cpu under load.